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This volume of heavy, largely theoretical psychoanalytic papers is loosely organized around the basic theme of Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience. Most of the papers were presented at either a 1998 conference on Psychoanalysis, Neurobiology, and Therapeutic Change, or a 1997 Festschrift honoring John Gedo, and the majority of the authors are faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago; notable exceptions include Gedo himself, Mark Solms, the British neuropsychologist, and Arnold Modell, the prominent Harvard psychoanalyst.
There are two parts to this collection: the first comprised of 12 papers by 11 different authors on topics such as “Self-Organization and the Autonomy System”; “Learning, Development, and Psychopathology: Applying Chaos Theory to Psychoanalysis”; “Are Mental Functions Hierarchical?”; and “Subtle Is The Lord: The Relationship Between Consciousness, the Unconscious, and the Executive Control Network (ECN) of the Brain”. The titles convey the breadth of topics covered as well as the heavily theoretical flavor of the collection. Despite a smattering of clinical material—some brief vignettes and a few longer case presentations—this is a group of papers dealing with problems of understanding what analysis does at a meta-clinical level, how it may do so, and how this can be expressed in the newer, alternative vocabularies of neuroscience, cognitive science, and neuro and developmental psychology.
A commonality to the papers in part l is the advantage to the reader who is already familiar with the referenced work of several non-psychoanalytic scientists. Whether Edelman's neural Darwinism, theories of linguistics, or the current state of multidisciplinary research on consciousness, a working knowledge of the background material is presumed of the audience. And therein lies the dilemma of this publication: for those who have this familiarity these collected essays provide a smorgasboard of stimulating, hearty, intellectual fare. For those less learn